The Flavors

Sarah and The Shrub get into natural & artificial flavorings, flavorists, flavor houses, a little bit of science, a little bit of cultural fun facts - it's a classic Shrubbish episode! Also, the challenges of dealing with moderating addictions when abstinence is not possible. 

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Croix_Sparkling_Water

​​https://nutrisci.wisc.edu/2021/07/26/natural-and-artificial-flavors/

https://www.bonappetit.com/story/truth-about-natural-artificial-flavors 

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/natural-and-artificial-flavors/ 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1-9wlAYZOM 

https://blogs.ubc.ca/communicatingchemistry2017w110/2017/09/18/what-exactly-are-natural-flavours/ 

ig: @shrubbish_pod
email: shrubbishpodcast@gmail.com

While I want to bring levity to the table, this podcast does contain descriptions of substance abuse. If you or someone you know needs help, the SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration) hotline is available 24/7 at 1-800-662-HELP (4357). 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Lick your lips and settle in. Life's a bumpy ride. Daily fresh-baked whores clamoring to get inside. There's so much rubbish out there, it kinda makes you think. Maybe I'll stay in today and sip a special drink. Hi, I'm Sarah McAfee. I'm an alcoholic and a drug addict, and this is Shrubbish. It is spring outside. I just went for a walk. It was very good. Um I do recommend taking some time out of your day to go outside and not look at a screen. I I didn't uh bring my phone with me on the walk. I just walked for an hour and it cured me. And it feels a little weird to like crawl into a closet now and and record something with the opposite of that. There is zero natural light in here, and I am looking at screen, and I'm literally plugged in. Um I mean, not my body, right? That would be it's not avatar, let's not get crazy, but uh yeah, there's no there's no light. Um I mean there's a lamp. You know what's happening. I don't need to explain that to you. But uh yeah, I would say uh the natural world is a beautiful place while we still have it. Let's uh explore. Listen, okay. Hop water paved the way for today's topic, and I'm so grateful. I would not have thought to this is one of those things I wouldn't have thought to look up, you know. Um it's something that I think about most times that I read the ingredients on particularly a can of sparkling water or another beverage, but it's uh, you know, always something in the back of my mind, and then I just maybe sort of like don't want to know, which to be fair, I feel like I learned I learned some things I can't unlearn. Not in a bad way, but I don't know that I can view like food the same again. Which was which is fine. Um maybe particularly more like drinks and things like that. But honestly, it's kind of everywhere. So let's let's get into flavoring, right? Um okay. So the the origin of this is is mainly because of all of the sparkling or non-sparkling beverages that I drink that say, you know, naturally or artificially flavored. Uh a big curiosity I've always had is what goes into LaCroix? Like, why does it um taste like the essence of something, but barely touching that essence? Like, what the fuck is that? Uh and I kind of, I guess I sort of thought, as I think a lot of people do, that they literally have like the like essential oil from like a citrus peel or something like that in the drink. And that's not exactly what is happening. And this is fascinating. So if you don't know anything about how things get flavored, I would stick with this because it's it's pretty cool. And I hope I do this wild journey justice. The big thing that I was sort of trying to look at was the difference between natural and artificial flavors, how they go into the drinks, etc. Big fascinating bit of information is that natural and artificial flavors are essentially the same thing. Flavor, when there is added flavor to something, it is flavor in general is just a chemical compound or a series of combination of chemical compounds. A lot of really good information I got for this research was from a delightful bit of audio uh from the from Freakonomics, an interview between Zachary Crockett of Freekonomics and Terry Measley, who is a flavorist, which we'll get into that uh a little bit later, from November 2025. So great, super recent, super relatable to this. And Terry gets into a little bit of how we experience flavor, and that totally blew my mind. So I kind of want to start off with what that is. He gives an example of an orange, and kind of like I was saying, I feel like citrus is a really good way to sort of frame this in your brain. So when one eats an orange, first of all, we see it, then we peel it, and in that peel, there is the oils, as I kind of mentioned, those the oils from the from the citrus are released, and that uh is a smell that we perceive, right? Then we open the orange, and uh the aroma from the meat, the fruits itself of the orange is also released. Different different smells, right? If you really think about it, they're different. Then you put the orange in your mouth, and that first taste of some of the flavor, uh, some of the tastes that he mentioned. You have uh acid, you have bitter, you have sweet, etc. Different tastes, right? Then there's like a biologic process. Saliva dissolves the chemicals in the fruit as you chew it, which activates taste receptors. Also, aroma molecules are floating into your nasal passage, which activates smell receptors in your nose. All of those receptors, along with things like the temperature or the texture of whatever it is you're eating, send signals to your brain, and your brain constructs a quote flavor that is, quote, orange. So it's all kind of happening, like flavor is sort of happening in your brain, and it's coming from a chemical compound. So flavor isn't really, I mean, flavor is exceptionally tangible because it comes from a from a chemical structure, and that's like the basis of everything. Um, but it's also not really tangible. Like there isn't really like this is orange flavor. Like you can't just bottle orange flavor because it isn't just one exact thing. Totally, totally crazy to me. So, in getting into natural versus artificial flavor, I got a really a lot of really great sources for this research. Um, and this is gonna be a direct quote from the University of Wisconsin-Madison uh blurb that I read. The FDA defines natural flavors as chemical flavor compounds extracted directly from plants, animals, or plant and animal products as found in nature. Some examples that they gave are like citric acid is naturally found in citrus, and avocado oil is directly derived from avocado, etc., right? Cinnamon mark, right? Um artificial flavor is also a chemical flavor compound, but it's just reproduced in a lab. So they're both chemical flavor compounds, just one of them comes from nature, one of them comes from a lab. The only difference really is the source material. Natural flavor, anything that's marketed as natural flavor, is derived from anything that's considered an edible source. So any herb, it could be yeast, a fungus, animal proteins, plants, and anything fermented from those sources as well also counts. And those are often extracted using enzymes or solvents. Artificial flavor is derived from a source material that's not considered food, like wood pulp or petroleum byproducts, which sounds gross, but ultimately, at the end of the day, every flavor that's listed on a food product, it's they're all just chemical compounds or a combination of chemical compounds, and they're all flavors that are products created in labs. There is no I mean, spindrift, which I just drank a spindrift, because I was researching this all morning and I was like, I want to drink something with flavor. It got in my mind. So I got a grape spindrift, and next to it was a grape-flavored sparkling water. I drank this grape spindrift because that's what I wanted to have. It was weird. I don't think I'll have that flavor again. But again, that wasn't a flavor. That was actual in the ingredients list, it says Concord grape juice and I think lime juice and sparkling water or carbonated water, right? That was what was on the ingredients list for the spindrift. For the grape-flavored sparkling water that was next to it on the shelf, it says naturally flavored. It doesn't contain juice, it contains natural flavors. But those flavors are coming from a lab. They're not extracted directly, it's not like a grape is in there. Nearly 40% of all packaged foods sold in the U.S. contains some kind of flavoring. And the flavor industry, I think I got this right, is a$17 billion industry. So the professionals behind the flavor production industry are called flavorists. Super cool. Um, and they work at places called flavor houses. And that immediately made me think of like Vogue, um, and that's not what it is at all. Uh they're like it uh big companies. Um there's a few major ones that conduct all the flavorings across very like big markets, um like nationwide kind of markets. Uh and all of their websites look exactly the same. They're all they were all designed by the same AI or the same I don't know. They they all look like welcome to nature. Um and it's I don't care. But it's a huge, it's a huge industry and it's everywhere because it's not just in your drinks, like it's in it's in uh a lot like m many packaged and um what's the word? Processed foods. Terry was talking about salad dressings or like packets of seasonings or things like that. A lot of these things are gonna have natural or artificial flavors listed on the ingredients, and all that stuff is coming from flavor houses and laboratories. Crazy town. So flavorists are like a super, like there's a lot of training and experience that goes into that job. Um, it's a highly sought-after skill. It's like a Somalier, but for either sweet or savory foods. They are looking to mimic existing flavors, create new ones. Terry gives the example of blue raspberry. That's not a real thing, um, but it is a flavor that we know. Um and they also look for new flavor trends. So this comes from the the Bone Appetite article. Circa 2017, and I can confirm this because I was living here and this was a thing, um, passion fruit was all the raid. Now, if a company wants to have a passion fruit flavored product, flavorists, if a flavorist wanted to make that product, you know, test the flavors, do the whole thing to get passion fruit and used real passion fruit for that, it would take a quarter of the world's supply of passion fruit. So that wouldn't be that's not a thing. That wouldn't really work. So what a flavorist is gonna do is taste the desired fruit, for example, passion fruit, and then they're gonna detect what they're tasting using a very specific glossary of flavor terms. Sort of like, as they mentioned in Bonapetit, like it's called like a wine wheel. It's like what a psalm would use to note the flavor profiles of wine. So they're gonna note very specific types of of tastes that they are experiencing, and then use that to match and mimic the flavor using compounds that are available at their flavor laboratory from their flavor house. So it's like a huge, it's like an artistic science experiment. I'm I'm fucking obsessed with this. This is crazy. He gives an example of mango. Terry, um, my hero Terry gives an example of mango saying that it would take um 16 to 25 compounds to construct a unique mango flavor. Because the other thing is, all these different flavors are gonna be unique to the different companies, right? Oh, like uh like a LaCroix, this is why it's different. Oh my God, I'm realizing this in real time. This is why different like sparkling waters, like the orange cream from one is gonna be different from the orange cream from the other. And you might have a preference. And it might not just be because of the bubbles, it might be because of the flavorist behind it. Mind blown. Mind blown. Flavors can also come from unique or surprising sources and can be listed as natural, but have nothing to do with the marketed flavor product. So fascinating. So, um a good example is watermelon. Uh a natural occurring product in the world is um African violet, and the leaf of the African violet ha can t contributes to uh a common flavor profile for watermelon flavor, but it's not a watermelon, right? So something that your watermelon sparkling water might say naturally flavored, and it might ha might be flavored from African violet. Okay. Um another example is vanilla. Now this one is a little a little funky. So uh it could come from vanilla, which is extracted from vanilla bean and definitely tastes like vanilla. Or an example is the benzoyan siam bark, which is a balsamic tree, bark from a balsamic tree, which has a like a vanilla profile to it. And then this could be, I don't know if they're really still doing this. This person, there's like a blog from the University of British Columbia, and this person seemed to have grievances with um artificially flavored foods. But they also said that something called castorium, which is a brown slime secreted by a beaver, um, also mimics vanilla flavor. And that I think that that's something that used to be used for vanilla flavoring, um, but maybe not so much anymore in the US, at least, and but might be used for things like scents. Because also these flavor houses don't just do flavorings for foods, they do scents too. So perfumes and and scents and all sorts of different smelly things. Sometimes artificial flavorings can have the same exact chemical structure as the naturally occurring chemical compound, and sometimes they can even be less complex or less processed, like as an end result, than if you were trying to mimic it with um using naturally occurring substances. Like it might be more complex if you were using a bunch of different combinations of things that were naturally occurring versus just lab-created stuff. Crazy. Artificial flavorings are often cheaper, easier, and less time-consuming to produce. They're also going to be more consistent. So there's a lot of pros for companies to use artificial flavor, unless, of course, they want their product to say naturally flavored, because then I mean, you could also say naturally and artificially flavored and have like a naturally occurring compound in it, and everything else be lab created. Um, and then you could say both. But again, they're all they're all basically coming from a lab, anyway. So my hero Terry also mentions um some interesting kind of cultural aspects to this. Um first of all, he said that flavor goes back to like Victorian times, um, like flavoring things, like candies, like old candies. Um he's also saying that that flavors, even though they're sort of trying to mimic the real food, they're not actually really trying to mimic the real food a lot of the time. They're sort of like a representation of the food. It's like he was saying, and it's it's true, it's like an artistic representation of this food in a way that makes your brain that tricks your brain into thinking, oh, I'm eating guava. But it's you're not nothing about it is actually guava. And it doesn't, and if you ate it next to a guava, it probably wouldn't taste exactly like a guava. There are some situations where it does, but for the most part, it's it's like a representation of it. Um and some of them, some of the things that we think of as like flavor, like banana flavor, it was a fun example that he gave. The banana I think this is pretty ubiquitous. Nobody believes that the flavor of a banana candy actually tastes like banana. Although I was eating a banana, and the first kind of bite does sort like the first little moment I experienced was more akin to a banana flavored candy than I'd thought of in the past, because now flavors on the brain. But the original banana flavor came from a cultivar called Gro-Michelle bananas, and those are no longer present. They were wiped out from disease. So but that but it's so ingrained in us that that is banana flavor that we can't deviate from that to mimic the current bananas that we have because everyone would be like, what the fuck is going on? So most companies aren't gonna try to sell a product with new banana, they're gonna sell it with the Gro Michelle type of banana. Um and so that might be the case for other like cherry flavor or strawberry flavor or like the watermelon that we know and love for watermelon candy or what have you does not taste like watermelon, but it did at one point to somebody, and so now that's sort of in the market, and people won't want to change that because then people will be sad and they won't be getting what they expect. And then also uh it was mentioned that there's the flavors are different around the world. So the beloved green apple flavor um in the USA. I don't really actually care for things that are artificially green apple flavored, but um I know many people do, that might be very different from a green apple flavor that you'd get somewhere else, like India or uh Uzbekistan. You'd have a di a different green apple. Maybe it would be blue, probably not, but maybe it wouldn't even exist at all. But yeah, so that's it depends on where you are as well, um, and sort of like the cultural background. And I will close out this section by quoting one of the videos I watched today where someone said that flavor is part science, part memory, part magic. And I think the magic thing is a little a little goofy, um but very true that it's part science and part memory. Because it's all whatever your brain is constructing, and it is all based on science. And now my view of flavor and food is completely changed. I hope that you are not disturbed by this new revelation. Maybe you already knew this. Maybe this is just a nice repeat class for you. Uh unclear. Um, for me, I'm never gonna look at a can of LaCroix the same. So I like to refer to myself as an addict. I feel like addict is a really apt description for who I am because I don't just have an addiction to alcohol or a specific drug. And various people have very, you know, their own opinions or their own thoughts on vernacular for this kind of thing. Um you know, some people refer to their relationship with alcohol, um, being an alcoholic as a as an allergy. You you hear that sometimes, um, or read that in literature. Um some people like to say, I'm a drunk, I'll say that. I I like that term. Some people, you know, don't like those terms or whatever. I for a long time didn't want to introduce myself in meetings or in general as an alcoholic because I felt like addict was just a more encompassing term for who I am. So another term is um addictive personality, and that that's a thing that a lot of people don't love to use. I like addictive personality because I do feel like that describes me. So I feel like I can very confidently say I am an addict and very confidently say that I have an addict an addictive personality. Those things work for me. It feels like really, really validating and ratifying to say that about myself. It it's like this is such a core concept of who I am as a person. Um because I I have a fixation on a lot of different coping mechanisms that don't involve drugs or alcohol, they don't involve a substance necessarily. And part of the problem with that is that with alcohol and cocaine or our favorite little adderall, um, those are things that I can do without, right? It's delightful. I cut them out of my life. It was something I fought very hard against when I first got sober and was first with my therapist, um, kind of examining sobriety in the years leading up to it, is that I wanted so badly to not give up these things because they were they were my coping mechanisms and they were my best friends and also especially more. So I'd say with like the uppers, but they were like that was my sort of status for being alive was vibrating on that kind of plane. And the idea of not being on that plane seemed impossibly scary. And with alcohol, you know, it's such a social thing. And it was like my longtime lover, and I didn't, you know, I I thought maybe we could just see each other occasionally. So I tried moderation management, and that's a fucking for me, that's a fucking joke. I can't, it was so much easier to just be like, these are things that I have a very unhealthy relationship with. I can't do them in moderation. So I'm going to, I can't, you know, I if I if I try to do it a little bit, I'm gonna do it a lot, or I'm gonna be thinking about it a lot. So I just have to not do it. For me, that was just so much easier to just be like, bye. Um although there is, you know, moderation management does exist. That is like an actual program. Um I I personally kind of feel like if you are considering moderation management, maybe just consider not doing it. But whatever works for you, right? There are other things, though, that we have issues with. Um, I think a lot of people, namely for me, social media, food, sugar, that we we can't do without. I can't I can't stop eating. And I I could choose to remove myself from any sort of electronic or social media footprint, but I don't really know how I would pursue any sort of place in the world as an artist like that. That's a that's a tricky thing that I would maybe love to figure out and feels a little daunting to try to to wrap my head around. Um if anyone has any ideas, let me know. But I also I can't like I can't go without email. I mean, I could, I could do all of these things, but it would be, I would be completely living a completely totally different life than I maybe want. So in order to live a modern millennial existence, promoting myself as an artist and engaging with art, having access to email and social media is important. Um so I can't really nix those things, and I can't nix food. However, I have an unhealthy relationship with eating, and I have an unhealthy relationship with social media. I went on a great walk today, amazing without my phone, right? Amazing. Hour, sunshine, moving, glorious. Didn't miss the phone at all. Came home. The first thing I did when I walked through the door was look at my phone. Like, girl, why would you why would you wash all of that away with this stupid thing? I feel like I actually relate more to the struggles of addiction with these things that I can't eliminate. The things that I have to moderate are a lot harder for me to deal with. The pain and the frustration and the exhaustion and the mental gymnastics and the the hyperfixation and the anxiety and the shame and all that bullshit that comes with addiction for me is no longer centered on drugs and alcohol, but it is centered on other things that I can't actually escape, which is super fun. But I do think um this is helpful to be able to say this kind of stuff um and bring it to the surface. I know there's a there's some sort of a lawsuit going on right now about addiction to social media that I heard was being represent I I'm I'm haven't followed up on where it's going. Um and I'm not entirely sure that I bel that I'm a hundred percent behind all of it, but it was sort of compared to the initial lawsuits brought on big tobacco. And I would think it would be just fucking magnificent if we could somehow curtail things like social media and fucking gambling and other things in a way that would maybe be more beneficial to people who can't just like eliminate this from their life. I I mean, I guess you can eliminate gambling, but man, those ad like the gambling ads, that shit pisses me off. That is like throwing that in your face. If you have a gambling addiction, there's so many ads and there's just like so much it's just out there. Um, like a dangling carrot. It's rude. It doesn't make me sad to acknowledge that I'm an addict. It feels very powerful. Um it's the way my brain works, and it's just it's like a part of my personality. It's a part of who I am. Um there's probably always gonna be something that I'm gonna need to manage. And that's okay. It's like it it's like part of being human. You know? It's it's just like a it's just a part of being in this body and having this brain. Um and there's so many amazing strong people who have dealt with things they had to moderate. Um and I feel in good company. So to all you addicts out there, I think you're a pretty cool cat. And I'm happy to be on your team. Okay. This is nice. You and I here together. Uh, we also have with us um a kiwi shrub. Now listen, I needed I have a fun idea for like another sort of culinary experience shrub. But I really just needed I didn't I couldn't do that this this week, so I needed uh a basic a base fruit. As I think I've mentioned on here, you know you can eat them like an apple, right? Like you can just eat the whole you don't have to the skin is edible and quite crunchy and fun to eat. The the little hairs don't they don't bother me. I'm also kind of a fucking weirdo and I'll eat the craziest stuff, but you can just eat them. But I've always like I never buy kiwis and I don't know why, because they're amazing. They're a wonderful little and they're such a good, like a small snack. But um, I bought I was at the store and I was trying to find something like interest, you know, I was kind of like, God damn, all this I've done all these fruits. And then I saw two options. One was kiwi, and the other one was it's like a tropical fruit. I think it might be called a golden berry. It's like a golden berry, but it's not a golden berry. A ground cherry. It's like a ground cherry, but it's not. Little yellow guys. Little yellow, they kind of look like tiny yellow tomatoes. And look, did you know that they kind of kiwis and these little guys kind of taste the same? Or maybe these guys were just a little underripe. I'm not sure. But um, I had myself a lot of fruit, it was delightful snacking, and made myself a kiwi shrub. So I'm delighted that I did this because I've eaten kiwi recently enough to feel like connected to the flavor of kiwi. Flavor. Because ordinarily I feel like when I get something that's kiwi flavored, I don't know what the fuck that means. Also, I wonder if strawberry kiwi is one of those flavors that's been around for a minute and doesn't taste like fucking either of those things. You know, I don't know. I never I never get strawberry kiwi flavored stuff because I feel like it is bullshit. I'm like, what is that? I guess I could make a strawberry kiwi shrub and we could see what that's like. Just like as a mid midweek treat. I don't know. Anyway, this is beautiful and it all the stuff, everything dissolved really nicely. So it it the sugar dissolved with the vinegar and the um kiwis pretty quickly in the process, and it's just like a beautiful light green color. Um let's give it some let's give it smell and the aroma molecules can do their job. I don't think I would know the fig shrub had a scent of fig on the nose. This has a set has a fruit quality, but it's not I wouldn't necessarily be able to pick out kiwi. But then again, I don't know that I feel like kiwis have much of a smell. Also, are they citrus? Are they considered a citrus? I don't know. Um Okay, let's let's dive in and see what we got. Oh yeah. Oh, that's super good. Oh, there's a lot happening there. There's a it really does a journey on your tongue. Um at first it's just very like it's acidic acidic acidity. It's acidic and tangy, but it sort of blossoms out to more of a kiwi taste, kind of like on the back and sides of your tongue. Also, I'm just drinking this with like super cold filtered water. This is not, there's no bubbles in this today. And I almost prefer that. And I kind of feel like maybe that's what I will do moving forward, because that is you get way more of a sense of the actual shrub that way. Oh, that's lit. Okay. I again, kiwi is such like when you when I eat a kiwi, I know for sure I'm eating a kiwi, but I don't know that I would I don't know that I uh it's kind of a subtle flavor, but it's definitely kiwi. And I do think if you did straw I do actually think strawberry kiwi would be fun. I think that would actually make a quite a nice combo, and I bet it would look gorgeous. This is sick. Also, you could maybe do if you wanted to like do like a strawberry puree and add it to sparkling water and then add some of this to it. I bet that would be amazing. Or if you wanted to buy yourself a can of one of your favorite sparkling water beverages that is naturally flavored or artificially flavored with strawberry and then add this to it, I bet that would be awesome as well. Fun. This is great. This is good. Early, early spring moving into summer. It's we're it's still in March, so we're not moving into summer anytime soon, but April is around the corner and I'm fucking pleased because I'm ready for some goddamn sunshine. Okay, well, I'm gonna finish my um a kiwi shrub. 10 out of 10, by the way. Um, I'm gonna finish that bad boy. It's simple, but just just FYI. It's it's a simple shrub, but I love her. And um watch the sun go down. So thanks so much for tuning in, and I'll talk to you in a couple weeks. And in the meantime, don't let the shrubbish get you down. Okay? Take care. Bye-bye. Thanks for tuning in to Shrubbish. Of course, I wouldn't be able to do this alone. Research references are available in the show notes, and that spunky show art and design is by the incredibly talented Alex Crawford. If you're looking to connect, we're on Instagram at Shrubbish underscore pod, or you can send an email to shrubbishpodcast at gmail.com.